Even the arrogant can learn a language

Updated 6:51 pm, Thursday, June 6, 2013

In my school in 1941, I had a friend whose Bulgarian-born father boasted 11 languages. Neither father nor son made much of this. They traveled a lot, and as the father said, “Nobody is going to learn Bulgarian.”

He was right. No one I knew spoke Bulgarian. If Bulgarians wanted to associate, enter the business world, or read up on science, they had to learn a major language.

French had been popular, but it was rapidly being overwhelmed by English and German. The size of a population affected its linguistic influence, but hard and soft power (military, economic, cultural) were more important.

There has always been a close correlation between military and economic leadership and sociopolitical dominance.

God may not always be on the side of the big battalions (as Voltaire said), but the world tends to adopt their languages. If the Athenians had not beaten back the Persians, it's hard to conceive of Greek philosophy.

If the Roman Empire had not endured for half a millennium, half of Europeans would not use a Romance tongue.

Americans are lucky in that we've never been plagued by excess of dialects valley to ridge and ridge to river.

Spain sports 11 languages. However, the Americas were Euro-settled after printing was invented and dictionaries published, slowing oral change. Spanish America was filled through the funnel of Seville — or southern Castilian — and North America had only two main English sources, north and midlands.

This created continents within which inhabitants could comprehend each other, found nowhere else in the world. It also made a North America whose people were quite arrogant about language. It rarely occurred to them that Letzebuergers or Catalans had a language, because small countries or peoples were forced to learn the languages of large nations to survive.

Thus you will rarely find an educated Hollander without German or English, nor a Swede or Swiss. The French have almost as much trouble as Americans with foreign languages, but I believe this is psychological or due to pride.

It's true that some people have trouble with language just as some have problems with math. But I believe that most people can learn a foreign language. The evidence is overwhelming. The first requirement is pressure from teachers, family, government. The second is necessity.

During a war long ago and far away, I served as headquarters company commander of a divisional tank battalion. I had authority to hire local labor, who were paid, fed and clothed by the Army.

Moving across a devastated area, my troops picked up an orphan, whom they made a sort of mascot. He was a cute little feller, and the men asked if we could keep him. He was too young and small for the books and spoke no English. But I knew that the fate of war orphans turned over to local government was horrid. I assigned him as a waiter in the officers mess, with one provision: He must learn English suitable to his job within two weeks.

In a few days he spoke beautiful table-waiter American. When the alternative is not eating, most people can pick up a foreign lingo pronto.